Apple’s iPhone has changed what we expect from smartphones and mobile computing. Has Apple decided to sit out widespread enterprise adoption in order to defend its user experience? What opportunities does this create for Apple – and its competitors – in a rejuvenated smartphone industry?

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This report serves as an introduction to, and overview of, the online backup opportunity. We provide a detailed overview of the emerging online backup supplier landscape, target markets, end-user adoption trends and future evolution, making this a critical source of information for anyone aiming to understand the dynamics of the market from an investor, vendor, service-provider or end-user perspective.

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The Tech M&A Banking Review: Cross-Atlantic Advisory ranks bankers who've advised on transactions between North America and European Union (EU) companies and provides a full list of advisers who gained cross-border experience in specific sectors.

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This report contains an overview of how end users can bring about this change with guerilla application development, the technology and governance issues raised by this mode of application development, and an examination of data from a relevant survey of technology end users.

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The Tech M&A Banking Review 2007 ranks the top US M&A deal advisers in the tech sector for 2007. The core objective of the report is to help buyers and sellers identify financial advisers that have had experience with companies like theirs. The report draws on data from The 451 Group’s M&A KnowledgeBase, a database specialized to the technology and communications sectors. The KnowledgeBase tracks more than 16,000 transactions for more than 400 technology sectors. In addition to providing proprietary deal analysis and valuation data, this database enables industry professionals to identify advisers that have advised buyers or sellers in any of those sectors.

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This report analyzes survey data to uncover what's really going on in the much-hyped world of social software, or 'enterprise 2.0.' It uncovers important trends about what types of enterprises are really investing in blogs, wikis and social networking technologies today, and for what kinds of initiatives. It also finds strong vendor preferences among enterprise users, even though the market is still immature. Findings are analyzed with a specific focus on vendors, investors and IT buying organizations.

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The M&A Outlook 2008 Report combines The 451 Group’s proprietary M&A data with analyst insight in order to provide bankers, investors and executives with a view of the likely year ahead in technology M&A. The report synthesizes the views of more than 30 analysts from The 451 Group and Tier1 Research who have spent the past year covering hundreds of transactions by key acquirers.

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The 451 Reviews and Previews Report provide in-depth views on what The 451 Group believes to be the main drivers in enterprise IT and communications. These views have been grouped topically in order to provide a comprehensive view of major trends and their impact across sectors from one year to the next.

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In this report, The 451 Group analyzes 10 sometimes competing ways to manage virtual machines. The 451 Group surveys the public companies active in the virtualization space and identifies gaps in their portfolios, and then investigates 50 startups, suggesting which ones might fill the acquirers' portfolio gaps. 451 analysts also take the opportunity to make predictions about the direction of the industry over the next 12-18 months.

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This report is about energy efficiency – of IT equipment, IT operations and, ultimately, of all organizations that use IT extensively. It is the firm belief of The 451 Group that energy efficiency – for financial, environmental and availability reasons – is heading toward the top of the IT agenda and will remain there for many years.

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This report focuses on de-duplication in its various forms and sets out to bring some much-needed clarity to the market landscape. It provides an explanation of the widely different technology approaches, analyzing the relative merits of each and their applicability to different market segments. It identifies which of the startups have truly innovative technological approaches and takes an in-depth look at the market opportunities across a wide range of end users. It also provides the results of a comprehensive enterprise IT end-user survey about the perception, application and results of de-duplication implementation. Finally, it takes a close look at how this market will evolve from the technology and vendor perspectives, including analysis of previous and future M&A activity, pending IPOs and potential new market entrants.

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This report aims to examine the state of the art in desktop and application virtualization technology. It provides a taxonomy of approaches to desktop and application virtualization – split into six subcategories and embodied as a periodic table of application virtualization methods. It conducts a gap analysis of the market with a view to future M&A activity, looking at holes in the portfolios of likely acquirers and where privately held companies might fill those holes.

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The 451 Group believes that over the next 12-24 months, the mobile office market will converge and, aside from RIM and a small number of overall survivors, will cease to be a significant center of mobile activity. The golden goose has fled (or is fleeing) the scene here, at least for the pure plays. This report takes a close look at the vendors in the mobile office market and at what enterprise users themselves are thinking in terms of how this market will continue to develop, as well as what factors are driving deployment.

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Server virtualization is transforming datacenter management by breaking the one-on-one relationship between applications and servers. It sits above the bare metal and beneath the operating system and 451 analysts believe that whoever dominates server virtualization will control this critical interface. The technology is becoming a major M&A driver as traditional hardware, operating systems and management vendors scramble to accommodate it. This 451 Special Report has three goals: To describe the state of the art in server virtualization technology and to forecast its future; to analyze gaps in the portfolios of large vendors that 451 analysts believe are likely to make acquisitions around server virtualization; and to provide a taxonomy of smaller bootstrapped and venture-backed private companies that might make attractive targets.

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The 451 Group is predicting a sustained shift in the way that geographically distributed enterprises design their application infrastructure over the next few years. In particular, a variety of demographic, commercial and workplace trends will drive consolidation of server resources, with the resources moving away from dispersed branch offices and into centralized datacenters. 451 analysts believe this move will impact many areas of system design and purchasing, but the effect will be especially felt by those managing and building wide area networks (WANs) designed to connect dispersed users with the applications they need to access. This will lead to the increased adoption of a class of devices that 451 analysts call network-based application accelerators. This 451 Special Report sets out to clear up some of the confusion currently muddying the market and to chart future trends, with their associated commercial opportunities and threats.

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The 451 Group believes that the traditional IT enterprise data protection model is undergoing significant structural changes as three emerging software technologies - data reduction, virtual tape libraries (VTLs) and continuous data protection (CDP) - drive a shift to next-generation data protection (NGDP) in the storage sector. The structural changes present opportunities for a crop of young startups, which are moving quickly into the market with these technologies, and for incumbent vendors as they look to maintain their position in the marketplace and defend against large and small competitors. This 451 Special Report sets out to demystify the various NGDP tools being readied for the market, and it analyzes the market opportunity. It provides in-depth competitive assessments of more than 30 vendors in this market, along with lucid descriptions of how the technology works and its inherent shortcomings.

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The 451 Group believes that a number of simultaneous enterprise IT industry trends point to a major shift away from the desktop-bound worker toward a fully wireless and always-connected mobile knowledge worker. Mobile-enabled laptops are becoming cheaper, wireless networks are becoming faster and more ubiquitous, and the suite of software needed to securely connect the mobile worker with the office, on the go, is rapidly solidifying. This 451 Special Report maps out how vendors in the new mobile enterprise value chain are likely to find success within this emerging (and rapidly growing) market opportunity – in many cases, serving as a disruptive force in the way emerging mobile-enabled enterprises will operate over the next 18-36 months.

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The 451 Group believes that enterprise software vendors can no longer afford to ignore open source. It is a powerful force of change with both upside and downside potential. In the worst-case scenario, open source can do severe damage – to licensing schemes and to legal definitions of intellectual property – if used improperly. The potential benefits, however, are also massive – making it important to clearly understand the critical path to finding upside in the commercial adoption of open source.

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The 451 Group believes that enabling text-aware application intelligence is a key forthcoming battleground for software vendors in a variety of market segments. These vendors include those that explicitly focus on unstructured data analysis as well as search, database, business intelligence and business application suite vendors. This 451 Special Report points to how the dominant application vendors, particularly those that supply business intelligence and customer-facing applications, are facing a critical period of opportunity and competition.

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The 451 Group believes the speech technology market is at a key turning point, where fundamental changes – both in terms of the value proposition and the horizontal technology stack – must occur in the marketplace if future growth is to be supported. This 451 Special Report, by presenting and analyzing three potential scenarios for marketplace direction, provides insight into the competitive opportunities and challenges for vendor companies within speech technologies, as well as the subsequent positioning, investment opportunities and marketplace M&A that will ensue.

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The 451 Group, which produced a 451 Special Report on the first wave of storage virtualization in 2001, now believes the second wave of virtualization is carrying the storage industry. Unlike the first wave, which was focused on simple block-level virtualization, there is more substance and sustainability than hype this time around. This 451 Special Report identifies the most compelling segments of technology development and competition in the second wave of storage virtualization, and provides competitive assessments of key vendors within these segments.

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The 451 Group believes that the next 18 months will see a rapid convergence of application and network management technologies – leading to $3-4bn in M&A activity over that period as the network and systems management framework vendors move into monitoring applications. This 451 Special Report, identifies the most compelling segments of convergence activity and provides competitive assessments of a cross section of key vendors within these segments.

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The 451 Group believes that 2004 will be a key development year for enterprise IT products and services built around information lifecycle management (ILM) technologies. This 451 Special Report focuses on the competitive opportunities and challenges for vendor companies within ILM, as well as the subsequent positioning, investment opportunities and marketplace M&A that will ensue.

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This 451 Special Report tackles the issue of what happened to the enterprise mobile revolution. It highlights the next 18 months as a critical partnering and acquisition period for vendors and shows how enterprise mobile-related M&A is set to grow beyond the $83m reported for 2003.

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The next 18 months will be a critical period of market development for grid computing technologies. Over this period, the commercial viability of the technology will mature and early-adopter customers will give way to broader adaptation of grids for enterprise applications both at single-site and multisite installations. The nature of competition will also mature as vendors integrate grid computing technologies into existing offerings and strategies ranging from utility computing to Web services.

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The 451 Group believes there is a fundamental marketplace synapse in the arena of CRM analytics — with supply and demand factors fundamentally out of sync. Some of the greatest culprits are the business intelligence (BI) vendors, which have been happy to provide analytics that are well behind the best of breed; meanwhile, the best-of-breed suppliers are typically too small and require too much integration to really succeed.

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Enterprise storage used to exist in a relatively fixed, centralized and controlled environment where physical security, access controls and known administrative entities satisfied requirements for management due diligence. The rise of networked storage has left the security industry behind.

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The move from voice-centric mobile devices with some data capabilities to data-centric devices with voice integration is under way. This market transition represents a major opportunity for the large software players to utilize their knowledge of the data application market and extend their power and influence into a new generation of mobile data services.

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Managing unstructured data is a problem that has been around for as long as people have been using computers to write letters and send email. But many companies may not be aware that they even have a problem, or may think it is an insurmountable one. Unstructured data is four times larger in volume than structured data, yet little effort is spent in managing and analyzing it. The 451 Group is pleased to announce the publication of the first extensive report on the UDM market. The report provides a comprehensive view of the market and its future direction, including strategic assessments of competitors - the major players, new market entrants, a group of players to watch and future market development.

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Even in the face of declining IT budgets, storage expenditure is increasing. The cost of storage management is far outstripping the storage hardware element. The ultimate aim is to treat storage as a utility - and storage resource management (SRM) is the first step toward this. The 451 Group defines and segments this market, providing analysis of the main companies and leading startups, and offers SWOT analysis and a look at future developments for each segment. The report provides actionable conclusions for companies, from whichever part of the value chain, to be winners in this market.

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No one has really begun to evaluate the competitive landscape or potential in the fragmented market for managing distributed applications. Over the past few months, a new breed of software and application management startups has emerged to target this market. Meanwhile, more established players are shifting their strategies and extending existing software technologies.

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No one in the IT industry doubts the importance of Web services, but no one is too sure what they really are, or how they will impact existing services. The 451 Group has produced a taxonomy of the market, something we believe has yet to be provided by an independent analyst firm. We also analyze in depth what companies are actually offering, and are planning to offer, as Web services.

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US cable operators plan to adopt the interactive television platform standard, DVB MHP. This dramatic news for the cable and interactive television markets could provide a great jump start to the industry. And while it is a significant endorsement of Java, it is also a major headache for Microsoft and others who have supported alternate technologies for the iTV market.

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The server industry stands on the threshold of a major architectural shift. Blade server companies, strongly funded by Wall Street, are taking advantage of the inadequacies of current server designs with a new approach that poses a real threat to the industry giants. The more farsighted of the major IT vendors are making blade servers a centerpiece of their strategy for 2002.

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Storage virtualization is one of the hottest areas in IT today. While investors have spurned most of the technology market, they have continued to invest heavily in this segment. Why? The need for storage is rising exponentially, and storage virtualization allows users to cut costs and increase flexibility. Put simply, storage virtualization separates the representation of storage to the server operating system from actual physical storage.

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